September - October - The Recreational Aircraft Association

Spratt
Bernard Geffray's
103
The Controlwing concept has quite a pedigree. It goes right back to the days of
Orville and Wilbur Wright; Spratt Sr. was quite involved with the brothers,
though the solution the Wrights came up with and Spratt’s concept represented
two distinctly different schools of thought. The Wrights felt that control was
everything; Spratt wanted automatic stability and then control. Ultimately,
the Wrights won out, though their first successful aircraft was dangerously
unstable; and the Spratt concept went into relative obscurity.
by George Gregory / Photos courtesy Bernard Geffray
Not entirely, though. George
A. Spratt’s son, George G. Spratt,
continued to quietly develop
the idea, building a series of
aircraft on the concept, including
a roadable aircraft, a number
of flying boats and a towable
land-plane version. Since then,
a number of experimenters have
toyed with the idea. One of the
latest is Bernard Geffray.
15 years ago, with nothing much to his name but
an intense desire to fly, Frenchman Bernard Geffray
built a trike. It featured an engine pulled out of a
Citroen and, being cash-strapped, he taught himself
to fly in it. The experience inspired him to find a
way to help other people of marginal means find
away into the air, so he built a few more trikes with
the same overriding principle:
simple, safe, and affordable.
At the Mignet factory, he
successfully fit a BMW flat twin on
a Balerit, a derivative of the Mignet
Flying Flea. The design is popular
in France and features a tandem
wing aircraft with a front wing
that pivots on its spanwise axis for
pitch control and gust alleviation.
He started envisaging a sort of
cross between the two concepts he was familiar
with, sort of a “Flea-Trike” aircraft. Attending Sun ‘n
Fun a decade ago, he was showing his idea around
when someone pointed out that George G. Spratt
had taken a similar path, and this led to a couple of
meetings between the two men. There was a lot in
the Controlwing for Bernard to like: it was simple -
September - October 2007 Recreational Flyer 9